Because Hunted has been written by Frank Spotnitz – who also penned much of The X Files, which I loved – I tuned in with high hopes.

I never watched an episode of Spooks, the Beeb’s acclaimed spy thriller to which this latest show has recently been compared.

However, because Hunted has been written by Frank Spotnitz – who also penned much of The X Files, which I loved – I tuned in with high hopes.

And, having done so, all I can say is I fear for the health of his children’s scalps.

Because, quite frankly – if the amount of glaring plot holes and clunky expositional dialogue evident in the finished script is anything to go by – Frank couldn’t “spot nits” if they were as big as bull mastiffs and perched atop of his kids’ heads blowing on kazoos and shouting, “Look everyone, I’m a giant nit!”

Anyway, in a nitshell (sorry, nutshell) Hunted featured Melissa George from Home And Away – as well as a few other things since, probably – as a secret ops agent who’s a dab hand with double-cross and triple-cross, until someone in her own agency quadruple-crosses her and she ends up with a bullet in her stomach on the floor of a café in Tangier.

Cut to a remote cottage in the Scottish Highlands one year later and she’s living alone on a diet of Spam (probably best she’s not got company then, the atmosphere in there must be 60% methane) and timing how long she can hold her breath underwater each time she takes a bath.

Understandably, she’s also a bit traumatised by what’s happened to her – not to mention the fact that the only Spar shop in a 100-mile radius clearly only stocks precooked meat in a can – illustrated by the fact she only wears dour grey knitwear and sleeps sitting down in corners with her back against the wall.

And she pouts too, with big, plump Angelina Jolie-style bee-stung lips that look like they’ve been rented from the DFS autumn sofa-cushion range.

If it was meant to look sexy then it didn’t work, instead giving the impression she was constantly struggling to contain a set of gnashers so protuberant they could be used to eat an apple through a letter box.

And what kind of spies were these anyhow? After all, we’re supposed to believe that she’d dropped off the radar for a whole 12 months, yet none of her former employers had thought to check at the Loch-side house she’d grown up in as a girl.

We know it was the same place because, clearly assuming everyone watching at home had recently suffered some kind of brain injury, the programme kept bombarding us with constant explanatory flashbacks – at one point it even flashed back to something we’d seen happening not 15 minutes previously!

However, the next thing you know they’re able to track her down to a randomly rented property in the middle of London – one which, hilariously, she’d managed to kit out with a hidden room which could only be accessed via a trap-door hidden behind a radiator.

Although when she crawled through we saw that the room not only had a big window overlooking the street, but also a desk set up right in front of it.

Handy when it comes to all that top secret spy stuff she has to do, probably.

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